The Art of Jazz and Life
It’s 10:30 p.m. and I smell smoke. Instead of jumping out of bed and yelling "fire!" like most fifth graders would have, I snuggle deeper into my pillow with a smile. I can feel the thrum of the bass like a slow pulse coursing through the floor beneath my bed. The dark warm air around me vibrates each time the drumstick strikes the trap, quivering just above the cool raspy slide of the steel brush caressing the snare. A saxophone lowly moans. Its melody creeps around the edges of my door, floating along with the cigarette smoke like a miasma across the moonbeams coming in through my window. In my mind I can trace the smoke back to the cigarette clinging precariously to my dad’s lip as he hunches over the keyboard. At least an inch of ash hangs forgotten over his fingers as they spider dance over the keys. I can hear his harmonies and intricate turns weaving under and over and around the melody.
Over the years, this experience was repeated often. Sometimes it was just my dad I heard, practicing riffs and scales, melodies and harmonies. Other times the basement or garage was filled with my dad’s friends jamming together. A musician and artist named Terry Galusha often sat with my father and his friends as they played. His specialty was caricatures and cartoon figures. He would sit drawing while the others played, occasionally chuckling gleefully to himself as he captured unique pieces of the men’s personalities. At my father’s urging, Galusha’s first oil painting was of five of these men. He used the portrait found on a box of Dutch Masters Panetela Cigars as a model. Both pictures feature a group of black-robed men gathered around a table with an open book, in a bare room lit only by one high window. All the men wear wide white Dutch collars below pale white faces, and all but the man in the background wear somber brimmed black hats. Two sit at the left end of the table, four sit behind. In Galusha’s painting, odd details reach out at once. The faces around the table are unique, each flavored by the caricatures they were drawn from. Despite the very old fashioned setting, several of the men have beards and/or long hair. One has curly locks that fall well past his shoulders and another man sports a 1960’s style goatee. Several of the "masters" even wear eyeglasses with modern frames. Their expressions don’t follow the usual "this is for posterity" seriousness either. One has a hint of a smile framed by his mustache, another looks owlish with his drawn brows and dark beard as he clutches the neck of a violin. The man in the background has an open mouth, eyes wide as he looks far to the right. He almost looks surprised to be there. (He should be, he’s the artist’s brother - rarely present but always pictured in some odd corner of Galusha’s cartoon’s.) The master standing at the table looks straight at you out of the picture, his eyebrows lifted sardonically. His angular half-shadowed face and goatee give him a slightly mischievous air. That’s my dad.
It’s been at least fifteen years since I last lay in my bed in my parent’s home, every nerve straining to catch the sounds of my father’s music. Yet when I look at "The Dutch Masters," I feel the same rush of vague expectation and excitement. What is it that gives this product of oil and canvas the power to evoke such a strong emotional recognition in me? Susanne K. Langer defines art in The Cultural Importance of Art as "the practice of creating perceptible forms expressive of human feeling" (84). If I accept her definition, how does that explain the strength of my reaction to another artist’s form? Do Galusha and I share the same feelings about that time and place? It seems obvious to say no. His perceptions of my father and his other friends are different than mine as a young girl lying in the dark listening to these "masters" of jazz. Even my own perceptions have changed and grown, as I have. Langer would say that the power of the art comes from it’s ability to capture and express what words cannot about those late night experiences (88). The canvas was created in part by the elusive feelings evoked by the musical art of jazz. The music itself was in turn an emotional expression of the men who played it together. This only emphasizes how complex the interweaving is of emotional and artistic experience and expression. Respected educator and philosopher John Dewey said in his "The Live Creature" chapter of Art as Experience that "The artist does his thinking in the very qualitative media he works in, and the terms lie so close to the object that he is producing that they merge directly into it" (16). Art gains meaning through experience with its object. The more intimate the experience, the more meaning in the art for the beholder. Picasso’s work holds no meaning for me. This is not because I lack the ability to appreciate his art, but because I have no frame of reference or experience to use to connect myself with it. Yet I could gain one if I wished. The effort to connect would not make the connection itself artificial. Like all other human endeavors, the appreciation and experience of art is something you master with the help of others.
The experiences that created meaning for me in Galusha’s "The Dutch Masters" are in the past. The picture, and the music, had meaning for me then, as now. But the meaning has changed. As a child I felt the excitement of a glimpse at an unfamiliar adult world. It was a world of staying up late, where the music wasn’t all written on the page and my father was more than just the guy who helped me with my homework and kissed me goodnight. Naturally the passage of years has given me a more realistic view of the advantages and responsibilities of adulthood. But that alone doesn’t account for the change in my perception and reaction to the picture or to jazz. Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky said that your best learning takes place just beyond what you already know, especially when "actively participating in culturally relevant activities" in a social context, with the support and guidance of parents or other more experienced guides. (Sigelman 188-9) This theory, called guided participation in the zone of proximal development sound imposing, but is very simple to apply. My father applied it unknowingly when he began letting me come in and listen when I was old enough to stay up a little later. When I was older still, he would occasionally invite me along when he played with various groups at weddings or sufficiently innocuous nightspots. Dad continued to shepherd me into his mysterious adult musical world by encouraging me to play with them once on my flute, and later to sing with them. By bringing me along with him, a familiar guide in a strange environment, dad helped me gain layer after layer of memories and experiences. He broadened and enriched my perception of the music, and also therefore "The Dutch Masters." it inspired. When I hear jazz played now I hear more than just the color and cool passion of the music.
I looked forward to my thirtieth birthday for weeks. My husband and I gathered with friends around a wobbly paint layered table in a dim smoky Mecca of a bar to listen once again to some jazz. Popcorn crunched underfoot as we shifted in our chairs to watch an unknown quintet wrestle speakers and miles of serpentine cord through the back door toward a barely raised corner stage. As I watched them, I experienced again the feeling of preparing to take the stage. I’ve never known anything else that absorbs and transforms me in just the same way. In these days of diapers and deadlines it’s a metamorphosis I mostly have to enjoy vicariously. That was the reason for making this unlikely pilgrimage. That night I sat insensate to the companions around me, imagining instead being part of the group in the corner. Stepping up on the stage there’s a flutter of nervous butterflies dancing in your stomach as a sea of eyes watch you. Familiar rituals ease the tension, checking mikes, setting up equipment. Anxiety kneads your shoulders with her claws before settling down to lie with you as warm abandoned relaxation. The band starts with a number that everybody can slip into like old jeans. And on this night, everything clicks. It doesn’t always. Your blood beats through your veins in rhythm with the drums, the saxophone keens a wordless melody like a barren maternal heart. Every note that pours from your throat is full and clear audible soul. And the piano’s harmony dances almost visibly around your head and chest, pulsing with each thump of the bass. The sets fly by and afterwards, unwilling to break the spell, you ignore the clock in favor of coffee and brownies a la mode at an all-night greasy spoon. A group of jazz masters sits around a table, each adding a page or two to the book of memories sitting on the table. My reverie that night lasted past the moment my caffeine slugged head hit the pillow. In the morning I woke up tired, but somehow recharged.
Dewey would say this renewal came from the experience of the art, through the jazz ( or canvas or words or whatever other artistic form you connect with). He says that the experience heightens vitality, "signifies an active and alert commerce with the world,... it affords our sole demonstration of a stability that is not stagnation but is rhythmic and developing"(19). The development he describes goes much deeper than an artistic appreciation. The change in my perception of "The Dutch Masters" is the result of more than growth of my knowledge of jazz and smoky nightclubs and late-night diners. Langer believes that the growth of artistic imagination gives birth to the insight, the self-knowledge, of the human mind and life (93). Like philosophy, whose questions gave birth to the other branches of science, the perception and experience I gained from the masters touches all the other areas of my life. I now live in the same mysterious adult world as my father, where all the notes aren’t written on the page. I’ve learned you have to add some of your own. A wrong note now and then won’t spoil the performance, and mastery comes from effort and having the guts to take a chance
I still like to stay up late, embraced by the dark. I kiss my children goodnight, then turn on some music. I snuggle down under my covers with my cat curled up next to me purring contentedly. I let my imagination roam until I slide quietly into dreams. Last night I dreamt I was looking at "The Dutch Masters" when my little boy sidled up to me, hugging the tattered remains of the blanket my father’s sister made for him. He reached out to touch the picture and asked "Who is that momma?" I answered, "That’s grampa and his friends." His eyes grew bright as he asked "Can we go see grampa? Can I play his piano?" This morning my pillow was damp and I smiled. I think I will take the boys to see grampa today. We’ve got to keep the music going. Dewey says that "Art celebrates with peculiar intensity the moments in which the past reinforces the present and in which the future is a quickening of what now is" (18). Somehow I think dad will know how to help me master the art of passing on my passions to my children.
Works Cited
Dewey, John. "The Live Creature" in Art as Experience. 6th ed. New York: Capricorn Books, 958.
Dutch Masters Panetela Cigars. Consolidated Cigar Corp. 5900 N. Andrews Ave., Fort Lauderdale, FL 33309.
Galusha, Terry. The Dutch Masters. 1975. Oil, 32x46 in., Private circulating work currently in the possession of Mike Short.
Langer, Susanne K. "The Cultural Importance of Art" in Philosophical Studies. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962.
Sigelman, Carol. Lifespan Human Development. 3rd ed. Pacific Grove: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, 1999.